Praying is very good.
In prayer we communicate with God and He communicates with us. There we can pour our hearts out to Him. Pour out our worries, pour out our cares, pour out our love and pour out our praises. It really is quite something.
There is the issue, however, of sometimes asking God for something and He actually gives it to you. Really, He lets you have it. Brother, does he let you have it.
There I was reading Proverbs 20 and I came across this verse:
Many claim to have unfailing love, but a faithful person who can find? (Proverbs 20:6)
Now I read it the once, and it appealed to me, so I got all excited about being faithful. I prayed the prayer that asked God to help me to be faithful. I’ll have some of that, I thought to myself, dear God let me have some of that.
The story is told of the person who asked God for patience and so was instructed to wait for the new job God promised him. After a week of waiting, he was still looking eagerly forward to the new job. After a month with knock back after knock back, he was getting a bit nervous, but was still content to wait.
After six months his nerves were getting the better of him with all the negative feedback. He found himself praying with gritted teeth. After a year of waiting he had finally given up on the new job and stopped looking, complaining to God about not getting the promise. As he moved on from looking, the very job that was lined up for him passed him by.
The moral of the story being, if you ask God for patience, you’ll have to wait for it.
Well in my case, when asking God to help me be faithful, my particular test actually echoed the heart of the proverb.
It’s all well and good people talking about unfailing love. We hear it often don’t we? It’s like a childhood thing being told of fairy tales where heroes go off to live happily ever after. We’re still given images of love that is to last forever. What tends to happen these days, however, is that for as many messages of endless love, there are the real portrayals of you love me on Sunday and ditch me by the Monday. What kind of love is that?
This isn’t only an issue about love in the relational context of man and woman. The stickability to causes and projects that we attach ourselves to and then quit at the first sign of things going awry seems to be more acceptable in a culture that treats things like consumer goods. We don’t like the product we can leave it and move onto the next. I don’t like the washing powder, I’ll leave it. I don’t like the clothes, I’ll leave them. I don’t like the church, well I’ll leave it. No wonder we have the same value on relationships, and no wonder the concept of faithfulness is still an aspiration for a lot of us.
(By the way, I’m not advocating sticking around when every indication suggests that you’re in a sinking ship and a lifeboat is made available. I’m just saying sometimes we want to change the cruise ship we’re on because the colour of the bedroom doesn’t match the bathing suit.)
In my scenario I was faced with an overwhelming feeling of being unsettled. Things didn’t seem right at all and my first instinct was to just leave everything behind and start again somewhere else. It seemed very reasonable to me.
As I was set to begin putting those thoughts into action, I was arrested again by this selfsame verse. I was arrested by the thought that God wants to see me being faithful to a case until the end of the season. The feelings of being unsettled were not wrong, it was what I do in the light of those feelings that would let me know if I valued that concept of being faithful.
More than to marital relationships, the vocation and other things, the real test is whether we’ll remain faithful to God. Not in the words on blogs like this, but in the every day acts of commitment to Him. Following Him, His way through thick and thin. In good times and bad.
I’m reminded that man is never at peace until He is in the will of God. Until then, he will always remain without peace. To keep the peace is to remain faithful to God.
Jesus gave a parable about the persistent widow in Luke 18. At the end of the parable, Jesus reassures the listeners that God will be just to His own who keep on crying out to Him (like prayer if you will), but then Jesus says something enigmatic.
I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8)
It won’t be about our talk. It will be about living the prayers we pray of being the faithful ones to Him.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
C. L. J. Dryden
Life With CD 